Trying to decipher exactly what kind of message Thompson voters sent in the Oct. 24 municipal election is a difficult task, since the results, individually and as a collective, send out some mixed signals.
On the one hand, voters seem to have rejected radical change, with now-former-councillor Ron Matechuk having been unsuccessful in his third bid to become Thompson’s mayor, though, much like in 2010, the number of votes separating him and the person who won – this time Colleen Smook – was only a few hundred. Political neophyte Ryan Brady, whose election would have been even more radical change, received only a couple per cent of the 2,785 votes cast.
On the other hand, the mayoral race results were not exactly an endorsement of the status quo either. Although Smook was often a member of the group of five councillors who frequently voted in concert with now-former-mayor Dennis Fenske during the last four years, her first term on council, and captured the most votes for mayor, the other candidate, Penny Byer, who was also part of that group, received about 400 fewer voters than Matechuk.
Similarly, in the council race, voters’ feelings were not totally clear, and not just because the same number of people voted for Andre Proulx and Chiew Chong for the eighth and final seat on council. They re-elected three incumbents – two who were frequently at odds with the mayor and five of their council colleagues, in the form of Duncan Wong and Judy Kolada, as well as Kathy Valentino, with whom they often disagreed, who garnered the second-most votes among all council candidates. Blake Ellis was the only sitting councillor who ran again who was defeated, but he finished 10th. However, he did receive more than 100 fewer votes than Proulx or Chong, the latter of whom was a frequent critic of the decisions of last term’s council. There were always going to be at least four new councillors. There could be five, however, pending the results of a judicial recount and a potential byelection to follow. Among the four political rookies who were elected, at least a couple frequently held views that conflicted with those of Fenske, Valentino, Byer, Smook, Ellis and Dennis Foley, who was the only incumbent not to seek re-election.
The school trustee results are the easiest to read, since the three incumbents who sought re-election all retained their seats and were the three highest vote-getters among the seven members elected. Presumably, voters are relatively happy with the status quo on the School District of Mystery Lake school board, or at least thought that it was worth keeping the three experienced hands on deck to assist the newcomers to setting into their new roles.
The most telling number of all in the election, however, isn’t the number of votes that any particular candidate got, but how many people voted overall. The fact that 37.5 per cent of people on the voters list turned out sounds good compared to just a little over 30 per cent in 2014 and is nearly as high as the 40-plus per cent of voters who cast ballots in 2010. However, when you take a look at the raw numbers, the picture is not so pretty. Nearly 300 fewer people cast ballots this year than in 2014, an absolute drop of nearly 10 per cent. The only reason turnout is higher as a percentage this time is because there are about 2,500 fewer voters on the list than there were four years ago. While it’s possible that last election’s voters list my have been inflated, this is likely also an indication that many people have left town over the past few years, especially in the more recent past as a result of layoffs at Vale’s Manitoba Operations. In that case, it seems, when it comes to the near-term future of Thompson’s economy, residents have been voting not with their pens and ballots, but with their feet, in the type of referendum that everyone who remains should not like to see.
